by R. H. Herron
“It wasn’t?” Mom’s words were crystal clear and slowly enunciated.
“Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t.” She actually had no fucking clue, not really. Why the hell had she said that to her mother? Why make it even worse?
“Okay.” Mom raised her hands and then let them fall in that take-a-deep-breath thing she did. “That’s okay. Sixteen-year-olds have sex. We know that. No big deal.”
“I wasn’t asking for permission. The only thing I need from you is to accept that Kevin Leeds didn’t do anything wrong. That he’s my friend and he wouldn’t hurt me.”
Dad spoke then, his voice dark and terrible. “Are you sleeping with him?”
“No! Dad!”
His caterpillar eyebrows were having seizures. “Then why do you think he’s innocent?”
“I just do.”
Dad’s face was tinged yellow. “How?”
“Because he told me.”
Dad blinked. Sweat beaded at his hairline. “Excuse me?”
Jojo’s words tumbled out quickly so she wouldn’t be tempted to reel them back in. “Sarah Knight caught me in the jail. I snuck in. She said I had to tell you before she did, but I only went in to talk to him for a minute.”
Dad roared, “What?” He fell backward with a cough. “How do you sneak into a jail? Into my jail?”
She lifted her shoulders. “I know the code. There was no one in intake. They didn’t see. It was totally my fault, but listen—”
“Jojo!” It was a roar.
“Listen. I asked him. He said he didn’t do anything. And I believe him.”
Mom stepped around the end of the bed. She came between them, as if Dad were going to rise up and hit Jojo or something.
Dad had never hit her. Neither of them ever had. Not yet.
Mom’s voice shook. “You can’t talk to that man. No one in CapB, either. Ever again. You hear me?”
“You can’t just—”
Her mother leaned forward. “Never talk to him again. Do you hear me, Joanna Mercer Ahmadi?”
Dad made a muffled sound behind her, but Jojo’s mother held up a hand as if to tell him to wait.
“But I’m trying to tell you, he—”
Dad stuck his hand out between the rails of his bed. He yanked Jojo’s mother’s shirt.
“What?” Mom turned. “Oh, Jesus.”
Jojo looked around her mother’s torso. Dad was paler now, his lips a dark blue. Sweat streamed down his face. His eyes fluttered like he was going to pass out, and he was trying to say something, but no words left his mouth. His lips twisted to the side. He looked like a stranger.
Jojo froze. Nothing worked, not her heart, not her lungs, not her voice.
Mom ran out of the room, knocking Jojo with her shoulder as if she couldn’t see her. “Nurse!” The sound of her voice got smaller and lower-pitched as she went, Doppler-like.
“Dad.” Finally able to move, Jojo lunged toward the bed. She touched his cheek, cold and wet. She grabbed the hand that didn’t grip hers back, his fingers limp and heavy. “Daddy!”
Nurses ran in and started thumping his chest. They hooked him to a machine. His whole body leaped in the bed like a fish on the dock, the fish that she used to catch when she was six. Dad was always proud of those tiny smelts she caught, and he’d laugh as they flopped around, dying, in exactly the same way his body was doing now.
Mom gripped her shoulders and tried to force Jojo into the hallway. She resisted. Then she puked on the floor under his bed. Her vision narrowed, her head spun. Her mother forced her into the hallway and made her put her head between her knees.
Behind her eyelids she could only see those smelts. Leaping, flashing in the sun, dying on their way down.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LAURIE STOOD IN Omid’s room, her spine pressing against the doorjamb. She swayed slightly to the right and the left, feeling vertebrae skip over the corner, back and forth. It hurt. It felt good.
Jojo sat in the chair next to Omid’s empty bed. She hadn’t raised her eyes in the last hour. Nothing was in her hands. She just sat there. Staring.
It was breaking Laurie’s heart, and she didn’t know what to do next. She’d thought—up until yesterday—that she was doing a good job of being an adult. She was forty-five years old. She had a Platinum Amex. Their mortgage was halfway paid off. Her daughter wasn’t on drugs, or at least not on the ones that wound you up in the gutter. She and Omid still had good sex.
She’d thought she’d kind of figured some shit out along the way, and now she realized she knew next to nothing. A woman in Syria, lugging four children through gunfire across a border into a refugee camp, that woman was a grown-up. She probably knew a thing or two.
Not Laurie.
She didn’t know shit.
But she had to keep pretending she did. “He’ll be okay.”
He’d been dead. For a few seconds, her husband had been all the way dead.
Jojo didn’t respond.
“They’re putting the stent in. He’ll be totally fine. People get them all the time.”
Her daughter kept her gaze down, on her empty hands. The only sign of life in her was the way her right heel jiggled, so fast it reminded Laurie of the way a stereo speaker vibrated, lightly, almost too fast to see.
“Did I ever tell you about the guy I talked to on 911 once? He was ninety-two years old. He’d had four massive heart attacks at forty-nine, Dad’s exact age. Triple bypass. And there he was, fit as a fiddle, forty-three years later. He was as surprised as anyone. Just think about it. He’d probably thought he was on death’s door, you know? And then he goes and lives almost double that. When he called me, he’d slipped on his stairs and turned his ankle. No heart trouble.” Death’s door, death’s door. Why had she said it in those words?
Jojo didn’t move, but her phone pinged next to her.
She checked it seemingly automatically, but it didn’t seem like her eyes even took in whatever was on the screen.
“Honey, you want some coffee? We’re both exhausted.” It was only 6:00 P.M., still less than twenty-four hours since their lives had been upended. Neither of them had gotten more than a couple of hours’ sleep. “A latte? Sound good? Let’s take a walk.”
Nothing.
“We’ll only be gone ten minutes. We’ll be here when he gets back from surgery. It could be hours, anyway.”
“I don’t want to be here.” Jojo’s voice was scratchy.
“What?”
Jojo picked up her phone and stared at it. “I asked Pamela to come get me. She says she’s in the lobby.”
“What?”
“I’m going to sleep at their house tonight.” Jojo blinked. “If that’s okay with you. I figure you’re going to stay with Dad.”
Of course she was. Somehow, in Laurie’s mind, they both were, even though he’d be in the ICU for hours, maybe a whole day, before he came back to the tiny room that would barely even hold one cot, let alone two. Laurie had thought she and Jojo would be with him in the ICU as much as the nurses would let them.
But Jojo deserved to get the hell out of here. “Okay. Yeah. Um. I’ll come down with you.”
The brightness of the lights in the hospital lobby felt like an assault, as did the laughter at the table surrounded by six or seven children arguing over a board game. One kid threw a handful of pieces up into the air, and a mother shushed him cheerfully and ruffled another boy’s hair.
Normality.
Why had Laurie taken it for granted, even for a single minute? She was an idiot.
Jojo marched forward, allowing herself to be hugged by Pamela Cunningham.
Pamela kept Jojo in her embrace and held out one arm wide, urging Laurie to step into a three-person hug. There was no way to say no, so Laurie awkwardly swayed toward them, bumping hips with Pamela and elbows with Joj
o. She stepped out again as soon as possible.
“Thanks, Pamela.” This wasn’t fair to her. How did the mother of a missing girl end up taking care of the friend? “But maybe I should go home with her. You’re . . . you don’t need anyone else to worry about.”
“I want to.” Pamela’s voice cracked like fine china dropped on tile. Her eyes were sunk deep into her face. Laurie knew she was forty-two years old, but she’d never, not once, looked anywhere near it. Now she’d passed it, had hurtled right past her fifties and sixties, landing at old age, literally overnight.
“Please, Laurie, let me take care of her. I want to fuss over her until I can fuss over Harper. Have you heard anything? Anything they haven’t told me?” Pamela’s motherhood was all over her face right now. That terrified yearning. She was feeling something Laurie had felt when she got the 911 call from Jojo, something Laurie was so grateful she didn’t feel now. There but for the grace of whatever was out there.
“I’m so sorry, no.” Laurie didn’t know what to say next. “How are you?”
She heard Jojo clear her throat. Yeah, it was a stupid question.
Thankfully, Pamela didn’t answer it. She laced her hands together in front of her belly and said, “Andy is home now until I get there with Jojo. Then he’ll go back to the police department. There’s something . . .” She paused and closed those sunk-deep eyes for a second. When they opened again, they were almost back to normal, as if Pamela had dropped her dipper into the well inside herself and brought it up. “There’s something about a cop. Who killed himself. They’re asking us if she knew him. Jack Ramsay?”
Jojo coughed.
Laurie turned to her, “Honey, would you get me another coffee?”
Her daughter narrowed her eyes, as if to challenge the request.
Then Laurie saw the understanding filter through—she watched Jojo realize that Laurie was going to tell Pamela how her daughter knew Ramsay. Laurie was giving her busywork, so Jojo didn’t have to listen. Jojo nodded and stomped away in the direction of the coffee cart.
“Did she know him?” Pamela plucked at the wrist of Laurie’s sweatshirt. “Was she really sleeping with him?”
“We think so. According to some Facebook messages we saw.”
“He must have hidden her. Somewhere.” Pamela’s pupils were tiny and constricted.
“They checked.”
“They told us they did, but what if they missed something?”
Laurie explained the dogs and the thermal-imaging camera. She explained how every section of the department was working together to find Harper. Pamela couldn’t seem to grasp more than a sentence at a time. Laurie didn’t blame her.
Jojo came back with the coffee—the last thing Laurie’s nerves actually needed—and Laurie said it one more time. “They’re looking. They’re doing everything they can, and they’re using all the resources available to them.”
Pamela knotted her fingers in front of her stomach. “If he wasn’t guilty, why would he kill himself, though?”
Laurie said, “We don’t know.” Was it actually safe to let Jojo go with Pamela? Would she be able to drive okay? Pamela hadn’t slept, either, and sleep deprivation caused fatal crashes. “We’re investigating.” Laurie wasn’t. It was the royal, departmental “we,” but it was what Pamela needed to hear. “And we’ll keep you posted every step of the way.”
Pamela’s shoulders lowered, and she sighed a breath. “Thank you.” She reached to touch Jojo’s shoulder. Jojo jumped. “Our girl needs sleep.”
Our girl. Jojo was Laurie’s girl. A huge wish rose inside Laurie’s chest—to keep Jojo tucked under her arm, to not allow her to go with this woman who was careless enough to misplace a whole child. Even her own untalented parents hadn’t ever managed to misplace Laurie completely.
But Pamela needed to be a mother right now.
So Laurie let Jojo go.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“DO YOU HAVE everything you need?”
Jojo nodded. She sat up in Harper’s bed, wearing Harper’s pajamas. She felt like some bird taking over the wrong nest. “Yes. Thank you.”
Pamela’s face was all wrong, and it was freaking Jojo out. Normally when Jojo was there, she’d sit on the bed and gossip with them until Harper kicked her out. She’d stroke Jojo’s hair as easily as she did Harper’s. She never seemed to listen very closely to them—it seemed like she just wanted to be near them without thinking too hard about anything they said, as if their chatter were a favorite radio channel playing in the background. MIA face, Harper had called it. Jojo had always thought it was sweet, though. It was the opposite of the grilling her own mother gave her if she so much as looked sideways at something.
Now, however, Pamela’s features were fevered. Her expression had a grasping neediness, as if Jojo had to give her something—and soon—but a glassy smile had been plastered over the top. Downstairs, Andy had looked similar—strung out on worry, shaking and exhausted with it. When they’d arrived, his eyes had been all wet and red.
Pamela clutched the doorframe. “Are you sure? Do you want some water? Or a cookie?”
“I’m good. Thank you for letting me stay over.” It sounded so weird, the words slanting awkwardly. In the past, when she was smaller and when Mom’s and Dad’s shifts often overlapped, she’d stayed at Harper’s house two or three times a week. Harper would yell good night down the stairs and then slam her bedroom door shut, and that was that. Pamela didn’t check on them much, none of the doorway hovering she was doing now. And Jojo hadn’t been formal like this, propped upright on Harper’s pillows, thanking her host politely.
Pamela reached down to touch the moon night-light that Harper still slept with as if to check whether it was warm. Then she straightened. “Wake me anytime if you need me. Anytime.”
“I will.” Would she have nightmares about Ramsay? About the sound of the shot that had echoed out of the house and into the car where she’d been sitting waiting for Mom to come back? She’d thought for a terrible second then that it had been Mom who’d been shot, that Ramsay had killed her. That’s why she’d run inside so fast, so fucking scared, though what she would have done, she had no idea. “I promise.”
Pamela looked angry for a split, terrifying second. “Good.”
A pause. Jojo waited for the other shoe, whatever it was, to drop. Get out. You’re the wrong child. Go home.
But all Pamela did was nod firmly and shut the door with a click.
Jojo’s parent-polite face fell into the sheets as she slumped down.
Her whole body hurt, as if she’d started some new workout routine. And it just didn’t feel right to be here in Harper’s bed, not without Harper.
Jojo felt her face flush.
She rolled to her side to stare at Harper’s bookcase. Harper wasn’t the biggest reader, preferring TV and her phone to books, but she kept all the books that she’d loved the best growing up, saying she’d give them to her kids someday. Black Beauty, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games. Jojo thought it was a little silly for Harper to save the books that she’d never read again, on the off chance she had children someday.
It was also cute.
She turned her face to inhale the pillow. Harper’s scent, Victoria’s Secret Bombshell, rose from it, and Jojo’s heart clenched as hard as it had earlier in the hospital.
She’d thought she was dying.
While her father was doing the same.
She’d really, truly believed they were both going to die. And her life hadn’t flashed before her eyes—instead her whole future had. No Dad dancing at the wedding she’d never have. No Dad at the college graduation she’d never achieve. They’d both be dead, and Mom would be devastated, and there was a small part of her that had rejoiced for like a millionth of a second that she wouldn’t have to go through deciding between colleges.
She took another breath
of Bombshell, then rolled to her back to look up at the ceiling.
Harper, though.
Maybe she was actually dead.
Jojo let the thought fill her mind for the first time. She didn’t push it away as she’d been doing up until now. She let it swirl in her mind.
Dead.
Harper dead.
Cold. Buried. Gone.
For a moment sadness threatened, then retreated.
It was just impossible.
Jojo couldn’t be sad about something that just flat-out wasn’t true.
Harper was somewhere. Jojo would feel it if she were dead. She knew she would.
Her very first memory was meeting Harper at four years old in a local playground. It was a clear memory—she felt as if she could almost remember the whole day. It had been raining, but the sky had gone blue. Together they’d swung on the monkey bars and then gone down the slide twice. Harper refused to relinquish her Tickle Me Elmo Extreme, the one that Jojo was dying to own. So Jojo had grabbed it out of her arms. Harper, who’d been wearing a pink checked cowboy shirt and pink boots to match, had pulled her arm back and slapped Jojo across the face. The sting had been secondary to the noise that roared inside Jojo’s head. She’d slapped Harper right back, and then this amazing girl with the bright green eyes broke into an inexplicable grin that was so contagious that Jojo, even while her cheek throbbed, laughed back.
That was it. They’d been glued to each other until the ring thing when they were fourteen, and then Jojo had suffered her first broken heart when she’d lost her best friend. She’d felt like she was dying. Life without Harper, who snubbed her in the halls and moved seats in English to be away from her, was in black and white. Existence felt pointless.
But they’d even gotten over that.
They’d run into each other at a resistance meeting at a café near school. Jojo had seen it advertised on a flyer with Nia Wilson’s picture on it. Nia had been killed on BART, stabbed while taking the same train Jojo often took, just because of the color of her skin. Jojo had walked into the café with her heart racing, worried she’d get arrested immediately. (For what? She had no idea.)
